• "The ex-Goldman Sachs vice president lives in the pleasant Washington, DC suburb with wife, Minal, 32, and their enormous brown shaggy Newfoundland dog, Winslow - named after former Browns star tight end Kellen Winslow."
• "His high school yearbook is filled with quotes he chose from rock bands like AC/DC and Rush."
• "Kashkari is a 1991 graduate of Western Reserve Academy, a private college prep boarding and day school."
• "Prior to his career in finance, Mr. Kashkari was a R&D Principal Investigator at TRW in Redondo Beach, California where he developed technology for NASA space science missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope."
• An anonymous and totally unsubstantiated HuffPo commenter says he's a right-wing woman-hater! "This person and I have a mutual friend. We were at an event last year. A few of us sat outside that evening, to chat. My Significant Other and I joined him, his wife, and another couple. Oddly, they were at 2 tables, segregated by gender. The women talked weather. The guys talked politics.
  Kashkari starts dogging Hillary Clinton. He said "I'd never vote for her because I don't think women should be president." Verbatim. My SO told me this, and I heard part of it, as I was sitting nearby. The other women were oblivious.
  My SO defended women, but Kashkari wouldn't have it. He insisted women should never be leaders. Kashkari's own SO said earlier, that although she had a career, "I basically follow Neel around wherever he goes." Verbatim.
  Kaskhari then said global warming doesnt' exist. He said wind energy is stupid. And he would look up things on his Blackberry whenever my SO said something, to prove him wrong.
  Because he didn't like non GOPs, he later went to our mutual friend and said my SO had talked about being abducted by aliens. Yes, Neel Kashkari said this, in an attempt to attack someone he disagreed with."

And that's just about everything that the entire media has been able to come up with! Email us if you know more about Mr. Kashkari. I sure hope he's good with money things.

Who is she?

Briganti is Fox's VP of media relations, and #2 in the PR command structure under Brian Lewis. But if Lewis sets the tone, Briganti is the one who carries out the executions. Here's a very abbreviated list of her all time hits:

• When Anderson Cooper chided Fox for running with a false report of Obama going to a Muslim school, Briganti responded with, "Yet another cry for attention by the Paris Hilton of television news, Anderson Cooper.”
• Briganti attributed Keith Olbermann's attacks on Bill O'Reilly to his "personal demons, and said "In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.”
• When Christiane Amanpour said CNN and Fox were intimidated by the Bush administration and practiced self-censorship in the run-up to the Iraq war, Briganti responded, "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

How did she get so notorious?

Briganti's real reputation was not earned by zingers about famous cable talking heads; it was earned with a conscious, longstanding policy of publicly bullying average beat reporters who wrote straight news that was not to Fox's liking. She once insinuated that a WSJ reporter wrote a story about Fox that the network didn't like because her hormones were acting up (the reporter was pregnant at the time). She and her colleagues routinely complain to reporters' bosses and try to get them in trouble with their editors for the crime of not praising Fox well enough.

She's famous for blacklisting reporters who do not cover Fox the way it wants to be covered. Whereas most media operations strive to present a professional face even if they hate a certain reporter, Fox does the opposite. One reporter told me that Irena blacklisted him and even turned him down for a requested tour of the Fox studios because she felt his coverage was negative. Also blacklisted in the past were an AP reporter and a Baltimore Sun reporter. The notable thing is that these are not commentators that Fox disagrees with; these are regular, run-of-the-mill TV reporters, reporting fact-based news, who were blacklisted because said facts disagreed with Fox.

Strangely, nearly everybody who's met Briganti in person says she's nice and personable. One reporter heard that when Irena first started going to Fox press events in New York, she was outed to reporters as a rather bubbly person. That undermined her queen-of-mean persona, and she had to cut back on her events schedule—or at least be a bit less nice. Others say that Briganti was in fact a nice person before she got to Fox, and that being there has turned her soul dark.

That may be because she is the mouthpiece of Fox chief Roger Ailes, the former Nixon hatchet man who loves to run Fox and its PR operation as if it was locked in a nasty political campaign. Since the golden rule of PR is that a flack is only as evil as her clients, it makes sense that Briganti would develop a reputation as a rare, unvarnished attack dog in media flackdom. She learned from the best.

When I worked at PRWeek a couple of years ago, I tried to write a profile of Briganti. This, after several people who had dealt with her assured me that she was the single meanest flack in the entire media world (which is true). I sent emails out to a list of people in the media that Briganti had publicly insulted. And what happened? Some turned me down, citing fear of her. Some didn't respond, out of fear. And one, in what I still consider to be the biggest bitch move I ever saw as a reporter, ran straight to Irena, telling her that a PRWeek reporter was out to smear her. This—from a reporter who had already been publicly smeared by Briganti—is akin to the kid whose response to being bullied is to grovel and try to please the bully further.

Briganti expertly strung me along for months, promising interviews in the near future and then pushing back the date continuously. Eventually the profile fell apart and never got written. She's good at what she does. She is still quite willing to offer negative tidbits about her competitors to this day.

Here's some more Briganti insight, culled from my own experience and what other reporters have told me:

• She is the single most blatant horse trader for stories in the entire media business. That means she will tell a reporter, "I'll give you this tidbit of news, but in return you have to write a negative story about this or that element of our competitors." When a reporter takes the tidbit but doesn't do Fox's bidding with the other fluff or nasty story (as no respectable reporter would), that reporter goes on Fox's shit list, and is subject to have a negative item about them planted by Briganti. This kind of blatant favor trading and retaliation would make PR people from, say, the Times or MSNBC laugh or shudder. Fox is the only practitioner of this level of media PR bloodsport.
• Some PR people have decided not to apply for jobs at Fox—jobs they could use—solely because of Briganti's bad reputation.
• Briganti and Fox routinely refuse to participate in any news story that also mentions CNN. They try to convince reporters to cut CNN out of television stories entirely in order to get quotes from Fox.
• We hear that even some within News Corp's corporate PR department (separate from Fox's specific PR department) dislike Briganti, because her bloody-hatchet reputation frankly makes the entire company look like a bunch of crazy people. Which doesn't go over well in corporate boardrooms. But Briganti, as Ailes' mouthpiece, seems to be untouchable.

Does it work?

This is the real question: does Fox's fixation on retaliation and fear tactics aimed at the working press actually benefit the network? Well, they certainly work in the sense of making reporters fear them; David Carr himself writes about the "series of alarms" that go off in his head when he writes any story about Fox News. One tipster asked about Briganti eagerly volunteered information (and called her a "cunt,") but added, "I can't be attached to this in any shape or form. Or she'll get me."

But does fear equal good media relations? In the short term, it can serve to temper negative stories about Fox. But it also serves to temper reporters' enthusiasm for any good items about Fox. And long term, it creates a press corps united in its hatred and resentment of your company.

Fox News'—and Briganti's—main mistake is attacking the normal, workaday reporters with such angry gusto. It's one thing to go after Keith Olbermann. It's another to go after beat reporters at trade magazines and newspapers who are simply doing their jobs. Ever so slowly, despite their skittishness and fear, media reporters will coalesce against Fox in a seething mass, just waiting for the chance to get their revenge for Briganti's slights.

And though one of Briganti's favorite pastimes is leaking to blogs, she'll come to find that her detractors can do the same thing just as easily. Blogs are far less likely to cower in the face of a threat of "denied access." And even papers like the Times are getting salty these days, as you can tell by Carr's piece. Smart PR people have found, with long experience, that it's better to try to treat people fairly and take negative stories in stride. Karma can be a bitch.

[And if you've dealt with Briganti and have some stories to tell? Recorded one of her tirades? Have emails to forward? And for god's sake, does anyone have a picture of this woman? Email us.]

Marc Jacobs had a bad childhood, his dad died, and his mother had a poor sense of style.

"I hate the term 'bad taste,' but my mother wasn't, like, a very chic person," he says. "Jane Fonda in Klute was definitely one of her role models, much to my father's dismay. But when I'd watch my mother getting dressed up to go out on dates and she'd be putting on three rows of false eyelashes and some hideous fox-trimmed brocade coat with a wet-look miniskirt and knee-high boots, I thought she was fabulous."

He doesn't talk to her any more. If he did, they would probably have to talk about working out, because that is what Marc Jacobs talks about. His trainer Easy is now his main man.

By the time they met, Jacobs was already dieting. "I never saw the bigger Marc," Easy says, behind aviator shades etched with mj, a Louis Vuitton gym bag at his feet.

"The fat guy that I kicked?" says Jacobs.

"The fat guy that we'd beat up if we saw him on the street," Easy laughs.

"The soft, blubbery Marc Jacobs," says Marc Jacobs.

Ha, screw your old self! But Easy is more than just a friend; he's a dawg.

Easy hesitates, then offers his wrist, which boasts a gold Rolex—a birthday present from Jacobs. On the back, it's inscribed love you dawg, mj. "I'm really proud of it," Easy says quietly.

As well you should be. At the end, Marc Jacobs sums up the philosophy that has enabled him to become a millionaire and worldwide celebrity:

"It's like saying, 'I want to look hot.' That is such a dumb thing to say," Jacobs notes. "But what's so cool about it is that you can say it. Yeah, I want a bunch of muscle queens at David Barton Gym to think that my body looks dope."

[pic via Arena Homme]